On April 24, the FSB said it had prevented an attack on the leadership of Roskomnadzor. According to the agency, a group recruited through Telegram planned to blow up the car of one of the regulator’s senior officials. The FSB said that on April 18 seven people were detained in Moscow, Ufa, Novosibirsk and Yaroslavl, while another suspect was killed.
The security service claims investigators seized homemade explosive devices weighing 1 kilogram, an F-1 grenade, a Makarov pistol with a silencer, two gas pistols and radios. At the same time, the published footage does not allow independent verification that the items were genuine. The man killed was described as a 21-year-old Muscovite whom the FSB considers the group’s organizer.
On the same day, four members of the Scarlet Swan movement, which opposed internet censorship, stopped responding. One of them, Sofia Chepik, was placed under 15 days of administrative arrest by Moscow’s Dorogomilovsky District Court on April 20 on a petty hooliganism charge. Her whereabouts, however, remain unclear: according to Agentstvo, her mother said she was at home, while rights advocates and former members of the movement believe Chepik may have appeared in оперативное video released by the authorities.
The FSB linked the case to Ukraine and described the suspects as supporters of right-wing radical and neo-fascist ideology. But there is no independent confirmation of that claim. Journalists noted that one detainee in the video wore clothing with anarchist symbols, while some of the imagery shown could point to different associations.
It is also unclear who exactly is being prosecuted: the FSB has not disclosed the names of either the detainees or the man killed, and no court cases under the article on preparing a terrorist attack had surfaced at the time of publication. Vazhnyye Istorii, citing a source in the movement, reported that Chepik may have been the only detained participant of Scarlet Swan and that the other suspects were not connected to the group.
The broader backdrop was a statement by Vladimir Putin that security measures and communication restrictions take priority when preventing attacks. Critics note that the FSB regularly reports alleged plots linked to Ukraine without offering verifiable evidence, and that similar cases in the past have drawn criticism from rights defenders and independent experts.